WRITER'S BLOC

How Americans are duped by race-baiting

Blogger and researcher Jim Fletcher has worked in the book publishing industry for 15 years, and is now director of the apologetics group Prophecy Matters. His new book, "Truth Wins," provides important analysis of Rob Bell and his Emergent friends.

The vast majority of Americans are not racist. In fact, minorities in this country enjoy legal protections not found in many other countries, and the American spirit of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps is pretty much the gauge by which the population lives. It is absurd, for example, to cry racism (Al Sharpton) when millions of white men rabidly cheer for mostly black professional sports teams.

In 2008, the country even elected a black man as president.

So it is with bitter irony that we note the escalation of race baiting at the highest levels of politics and media. Author Jack Cashill now alerts us to many facts about the Trayvon Martin case that we didn’t know – most concerning media involvement in portraying George Zimmerman as a bloodthirsty murderer.

The 2012 shooting death of Martin, by George Zimmerman, has become one of the most famous cases of its kind in recent memory. Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal sent shockwaves.

Like a gritty crime novelist, Cashill takes us right into the story, on the night of Feb. 26, 2012, when Zimmerman was out helping safeguard his neighborhood. Crime in his Florida neighborhood had escalated in recent months, so Zimmerman and other locals formed a Neighborhood Watch Program.

The key thing that strikes the reader about the account Zimmerman gave police was that he saw a tall black man “walking in the rain and looking into homes.” Needless to say, the media portrayal of Trayvon Martin as a child was inaccurate.

Cashill presents the transcript of the initial call he made to police. Here is a snippet:

Zimmerman felt that his life was in danger and acted accordingly. What followed for many months – and a dramatic trial – was George Zimmerman being painted in the media as a stone-cold killer hunting young black men. This was the narrative pushed by the usual suspects in the race-baiting community.

Even the president.

When Barack Obama opined that if he had a son, the son would look like Trayvon Martin, most people realized he was fanning the flames of the racial wars … as if they needed further stoking. It was an inelegant (evil?) moment from the nation’s highest office and was evidence that for various reasons, it is in the best interests of certain politicians, religious leaders and media figures to paint America as a hate-filled country.

Cashill understands all this very well: “The phrase, ‘Politically Correct’ may sound benign, even amusing when used by late-night comedians, but it loses all its innocence when the forces driving a politically correct idea put their weight behind it. On no issue are those forces more intimidating than on the issue of race. In the face of those forces, most white Americans opt for silence, the consequences of which author Colin Flaherty dissects scarily well in his bestseller ‘White Girl Bleed a Lot,’ a chronicle of the media’s failure to talk about black-on-white crime. George Zimmerman’s friends learned the price of challenging the PC regime when they dared to speak out for him in public.”

Only one of the media outlets framing the story in biased terms was an April 2012 issue of People. The cover photo of a very young Martin was accompanied by verbiage like: “a family devastated and a country outraged.”

Outraged were those race-baiters who keep fanning the flames in order to be relevant to their constituencies. And, as Cashill astutely noted, the majority of folks seeing a biased magazine cover will not actually read anything; image is everything.

Cashill does note that a local paper, the Orlando Sentinel, was one of the few to run the now famous “hoodie” photo, which more accurately portrayed Martin at the time of his death.

Cashill then goes on to explain how media propaganda works in modern America: “Team Trayvon made sure that the world’s media had other choices and flooded the market with precleared images of a youthful Martin.”

Eventually, of course, Zimmerman’s somewhat shocking acquittal enraged Martin’s supporters even further. And at a time when the president of the United States could have issued a statement urging the country toward unity and healing, he chose his inflammatory message that presented Trayvon Martin as a targeted, unfortunate black youth, hunted-down by white savages (even though Zimmerman is Hispanic).

Jack Cashill’s dogged reporting and edgy writing make “If I Had a Son” one of the year’s best political and cultural analyses.